a little from her usual exact
mothering of him. She had him sit by her at tea of course; but she let
Emily Gibbs give him his bath, and contented herself with watching the
operation. She was pleased that the Lump did not accept the change
without objection. He pointed to her and said quite severely:

"Pollyooly."

"It's all right, Roger dear," she said in a soothing tone. Then
turning to Emily Gibbs, she added: "I wonder what he means?"

"I don't know, your ladyship. But he is the dearest little boy I ever
see!" said Emily Gibbs with enthusiasm. "I never knew as how there was
such a little boy!" and she kissed him.

Pollyooly frowned slightly. These transports seemed to her misplaced.
They were an invasion of her proprietary rights in him. But she did
not frown long: after all, the fonder Emily Gibbs was of him the more
carefully she would watch over him.

At supper in the servants' hall Emily Gibbs underwent a severe
cross-examination. The coming of the Lump to the court had indeed set
tongues wagging; and Rawlings, since he had failed to find the duke
quite satisfactory, was doing nothing to check it. The chief housemaid
and the second cook (the _chef_ was a Frenchman with a strong Italian
accent which marked also his cooking) seemed to have made up their
minds that Emily Gibbs must necessarily have been made the repository
of the secret of the Lump's origin; and they spared no effort to
extract that secret from her. Emily Gibbs had the most uncomfortable
supper of her life: her fellow-servants, naturally, resented bitterly
the fact that she had met the Lump for the first time that very day at
Waterloo station. They wanted pegs on which to hang romance; and she
did not provide them.

At last the second cook said:

"Well: it's as plain as a pikestaff to me that that little boy is the
son of a young lady as his grace was in love with before he ever met
the duchess. And she married somebody else; and they're both dead; and
his grace 'as adopted their little boy for old sake's sake."

The first housemaid and the second housemaid accepted this theory
warmly; and then Emily Gibbs said:

"And I expect she had red hair."

The basic facts of the affair having been thus comfortably settled, the
talk turned on the identity of the lady, and then on the colour of her
hair. Rawlings was of the opinion that the redness of the Lump's hair
was evidence that either his father or his mother had been a relation